A place to return to
by Morgane
Summary: "And I can't help but think that as much as I hated Tom, at least with him I was complete." Years and years after he had defeated the Dark Lord, Harry returns to The Riddle House (Sequel to "Cursum perficio")


I don't own anything besides the plot!  
  
"A place to return to" is a sequel to my fic "Cursum perficio" (but can be read on its own as well) and goes to all my reviewers who inspired it in the first place! Don't let anybody say that feedback serves for nothing ^_~  
  
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A PLACE TO RETURN TO  
  
In my world  
  
Love is for poets  
  
Never the famous balcony scene  
  
Just a dying faith  
  
On the heaven's gate  
  
~ Swan Heart/Nightwish  
  
The place hasn't changed over the years.  
  
This is the first, nearly analytical thought that crosses my mind when I apparate in front of the huge uninviting building, when I approach it with slow, hesitant steps. The same feeling of solitude I can still recall from the past, the same unnerving silence which only hides the fact that decadence and hatred threaten to swallow the whole place, still hangs around here like it did all those years ago and shortly I allow myself a moment of reverie. No, some things never changed.  
  
Others did, however.  
  
Seen with the naive innocence of child eyes, the Riddle House had been the epitome of all things evil and sinful to me, of all I feared and dreaded, of all that I never wanted to be. I remember that the mere thought of Tom, barely seventeen then, murdering the only remains of his family in this spidery ruin before me, had been enough to turn these vast grounds into the abyss of hell in my imagination, but nowadays I find that I can understand, if not even respect, his sentiments completely. Nowadays I don't see the hardened, cruel man with the crimson eyes when I think of him, but the child he must have been once.  
  
The child.  
  
He did never play in these gardens, never sit on the side porch on cloudless nights to look up at the stars hanging low over the distant horizon. He only came back here to loose his innocence, to kill the ones who had denied him a happy childhood as much as his right to know love. To murder a family that had abounded him not for what he did, but for what he was.  
  
The parallels to my own life are almost amusing.   
  
Both orphans, both alone in a world without the comforting memory of somebody's unconditional love, nothing ever coming to either of us without price. We could go to Hogwarts, but we had to live up to the greatest of expectations because of our origin. We could have loving mothers, but we had to bear the knowledge that they had died for us. We could become living legends, but we had to become murderers for it. It took me much longer than him, but today I find that I am tired of these kinds of compensation.  
  
I had to kill you, Tom, I whisper into the vastness of the hall I have finally entered. Just like you had to murder the ignorant fools living in this place. I had to turn my wand against you, had to do it because there was no other way, because otherwise the pain in me would never have been sealed off and life would have been but a monstrous measurement of what I should have suffered until my body would have denied me his duties.  
  
And for the barest of instants I feel his presence around me, this blood-chilling but in its familiarity so comforting presence telling me that it is okay, that it is of little matter now and I almost smile.  
  
Of little matter.  
  
Gorgeously ironical, that describes the last ten years of my life just as well - the honours, the glory I gained with defeating him, the admirers and the people who feared my powers, none of that mattered. Not even my friends.  
  
My friends.  
  
The words taste so bitter on my tongue these days.  
  
*You're a great wizard, Harry, you really are*  
  
*It's you who have to go in the end. Not Hermione, not me, but you!*  
  
Yes, deliver us from evil, safe us from the bad men, but please cover their faces when it's done, and not too many war stories in our presence, ok?   
  
*We could have loved another like no one else would have been capable of.*  
  
Damn his crushing accuracy.  
  
Because Tom had been right, right about everything he had told me, there was no eternally true Gryffindor friendship, no "us" to be part of any longer. It had fallen to dust and ashes the moment I raised my wand against him, the moment I invited the cold into my soul, and no matter how desperately I worked to piece the sandcastle back together again after, no matter how I tried to ignore the darkness inside me, it was never quite perfect again. It was never again how it *was*.  
  
  
  
Truth to be told, this gap, this hole where my life used to be, sometimes still plagues me.   
  
But can I blame them, Ron, Hermione, Sirius and all the others, who expect me to un-know all the things the darkness has taught me? Of course they fear the fallout, of course they loathe the pain; for them, it heralds only endings. There is no way they would ever understand that one of their own could equate pain with pleasure, could prefer darkness, total darkness, to the stained world of grey they live in and so I let much go, let them believe what they want to believe. I show them the mask of a man brimming with life and joy and hope, not the hardened, darkened, loving killer that I have become while hiding my bloodstained hands behind my back.  
  
The opposite of love is not hatred. It is indifference.  
  
And this is one of the reasons why I had to return to the Riddle House this night, to the living memory of Tom, whose presence I can feel around me like the embrace of my long-lost father.   
  
He at least knew me.  
  
Strange as it is, these days this thought is a consolation to me.  
  
  
  
*Listen, Harry, there are things in The Riddle House, things I want you to have. Books, potions... they will help you to understand our world and yourself so much better. Don't let your ridiculously moral friends destroy them. They will help you on your way.*  
  
This fateful night under the surprisingly soft snow fall, I have refused his offer out of fear of becoming like him, of becoming everything that I simply couldn't be, me being James and Lily's son, Gryffindor, Champion of Light, but today, weary and tired of pretending not to want what I do, I can finally accept the gift that was offered for me. I can accept that I am already like him.  
  
Knowledge and the power within. Ambition, kink and the ability to crush your enemy, no matter who it is. The longing for eternal life.  
  
These days I can acknowledge that without remorse.  
  
These days every snowflakes that falls from the sky on my skin is a gentle caress of his.  
  
And I can't help but think that as much as I hated Tom, at least with him I was complete.   
  
*You are the closest thing I ever had for a son.*  
  
Was there any way this end could have been avoided, I silently muse when I finally stop before the door to the living memory of him, the door to the fallout, only to realize that, deep down inside, I know the answer to this question just too well. It couldn't. I had been too afraid to lose, Tom too afraid to win and then it had been just too late.   
  
If I have learned anything from all this, it is that nothing is worth fighting for.  
  
And so I have come back to this place, to the legacy that is the only bloody thing that was ever freely given to me.  
  
Because he was right, has always been right, about every accursed thing and when I open the secret door to his chambers, I can feel the magic of this place, the promise of a hundred generations of all that I was born and all that I would die.  
  
If I would die.  
  
  
  
A smile, weary but for once true, appears on my lips.  
  
No more compensations.  
  
FINIS  
  
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Okay, I hope that I did not disappoint your expectations ^^. Please let me know what you think about it. 


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